


Songs From My Misspent Youth

by Catchclaw



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Academy Era, Character Study, First Kiss, Friends to Lovers, Long-Distance Communication, Loss of Parent(s), M/M, Memories, Parent-Child Relationship, Regrets, Starfleet Academy, end of life decisions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-12
Updated: 2017-04-12
Packaged: 2018-10-18 03:09:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10608048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: McCoy's father is dying. He's the last one to know.





	

“Are you sure?” Kirk says. “I can miss a few days, Bones. It’s no big deal.”

He’s perched on the edge of McCoy’s bed, watching him throw things at a suitcase. He looks more freaked out than Leonard feels.

“It’s fine. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, anyway.” He turns, gives the kid a ghost of a smile. “‘Sides, nobody’s at their best when somebody’s sick, you know? It ain’t gonna be fun, this trip.” 

Kirk gives him a look that shouts _not buying your bullshit_. “Why didn’t they call you sooner? I don’t get it. You said he’s been sick for, what, three months?”

McCoy snaps the case shut without any goddamn clue about what he’s put inside. “Four.”

“Four! Jesus. What the hell were they waiting for?”

Leonard sighs. “He told them not to call me. Pretty much ordered it, knowing him.”

“What?”

“Me and Dad, we’re not on the best speaking terms. Never have been, to be honest. But after the divorce, he—” Leonard stops, scrubs a hand through his hair. “Let’s just say he made it real clear that if anybody shoulda been booted out of the family, it was me and not my ex-wife.”

Kirk sits back, his eyes wide. “Shit.”

“Yeah,” McCoy says. “Exactly. And wouldn’t you know it, she’s the one who finally bothered to call. Not my sister, not my jackass of a brother-in-law: no, my goddamn ex.”

“Man, there’s a hell of a lot I don’t know about you, isn’t there?” Kirk’s giving him a look, long-range and appraising. “Like, you have a sister? Since when?”

“Since I was born, jackass. She’s seven years older than me.”

“And you never talk about your ex.”

McCoy just glares.

“I mean," Kirk says, "you know everything there is to know about me—”

“Whether I want to or not.”

“Well, ok. Yeah. But you”—he squints up at Leonard, blue streaks going narrow—”it’s like you’ve had this whole other life.”

McCoy rolls his eyes, pokes around for his wallet. “Believe it or not, my life didn’t start the moment I met you, kid.”

Kirk gets up, reaches around him, plucks his wallet off the desk and presses it into his palm. “No shit. But sometimes, I swear, you’re a black fucking box, Len.”

He takes the air tram with McCoy to the commercial spaceport in San Jose. Doesn’t ask, he just comes. He’s supposed to be in class; his cadet uni gets him a lotta good stares. He doesn’t seem to notice.

“You’ll call,” Kirk says at the gate. “You’ll comm me and let me know how he’s doing." 

“Is that an order?”

Jim grins, gives up the blue blaze. “Oooh, did I sound like a captain?”

McCoy shrugs. “Eh. It wasn’t too bad.”

Kirk’s smile wavers and he throws his arms around Leonard, hugs him hard, and Leonard finds himself squeezing back.

“Take care of yourself,” the kid says in his ear. “Don’t forget that, ok?”

And then he’s gone, ducking out of McCoy’s arms and diving back into the crowd, a pip of red swallowed in a sea of civilians.

 

                                                                                                          ****

  
Nobody’s there to meet him on the other end, in Atlanta. Would’ve been stranger if there had been.

He picks up a cab and punches in the coordinates from memory. Funny, he thinks, what sticks in your head. He leans back as the cab lifts and watches the spaceport unroll below him, this great, mechanical thing that stretches out to the horizon, as far as his two eyes can see.

Part of him’s tempted to chuck open the door and leap out into the air, frankly, to get a cool drink of breath before he plummets down and drowns in his own history, in the mess he made of his life long before he staggered onto that recruit ship in Iowa. It’d been a long time coming, those steps, that trip, and for the first time in twenty years, he’d felt like he was moving in the right direction: forward, however fucking terrifying, rather than back.

But now here he is again, stuck in the stream of the past.

It’s been two years since he’d talked to his father, since he’d set foot in Georgia. Three since things had gone to proper shit with Randa, since he’d gotten in real good with the bottle.

Well. At least he’d managed to shake off that particular demon.

The rest of hell’s Hallelujah chorus, however, was still firmly in place, ensconced in gentility, in niceties, in painting a pretty picture while inside, it burned.

There was a good goddamn reason or forty that he’d stayed away.

The cab sighs, points its nose towards the ground, and dips into the deceleration stream, joining a steady flow of air cars dropping towards the outskirts of Savannah. The car’s high enough, still, that Leonard can see the ocean beyond, waving its hands at the sky, and for a moment, he’s tempted to reprogram the cab, to send it sailing out towards the waves, up towards Charleston. He could hide out there for a week, maybe two, with the Craters—Nancy and Robert wouldn’t care. They’d be glad to see him—and nobody would be the wiser. Randa would figure he’d lost his nerve, the Academy would chalk it up to personal leave, and nobody else in the fucking world knew he was out here.

Except Kirk.

And Kirk would worry. Yeah, he would. Hell, the kid would probably hitchhike out here if he had to—no, Leonard thinks, his lips twitching: he’d steal a fucking shuttlecraft right out of the hanger. Probably wouldn’t even have to commit to fisticuffs; he’d just wink at the right guy, filch the keys from the right girl, and talk his way past any being who dared to get in between.

He may be an impetuous idiot, most days, but Jim’s a A+ fucking felon, always.

McCoy chuckles, tries to imagine Kirk out here, and for a moment, he’s sad that he isn’t, a little pissed at himself for telling the kid to stay home. Six months he’s known this guy, shared a terrifyingly small dorm room with him, and it’s already hard to picture what the next few days will be like without Kirk cluttering them up with his chatter, his reportage on his day, on what Admiral said what snide shit about the other, about the cute Aldeberan in Interstellar Statistics who wrote zur comm number on Kirk’s palm.

“Did ze ask if that’s the hand you jerk off with?” Leonard had said, pitching back in his desk chair.

Kirk’s eyes had gone wide, like big, pervy snowglobes. “No!” he’d said. “Oh shit, Bones, do you think ze wanted me to—?”

Leonard laughed, forgot all about the ten Andorian pathogens he was in the middle of memorizing. “First of all, no, and second of all, your joy at that prospect is just a little disturbing.”

Jim grinned. “Just a little? Man, I must be slipping.”

“Or else I’m getting desensitized.”

Kirk popped up from his bed, stretching, made for the head. “Well, I’m gonna go wash it off.”

“Please tell me that’s not a euphemism.”

A toothy grin around the doorframe. “It wasn’t. But it is now.”

McCoy snickered, tried to swallow it. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“You were laughing,” Jim called from the bathroom, pitching his voice over the sound of the shower. “I heard you, Bones. Don’t try and lie.”

McCoy tipped his head back and grinned at the ceiling, biding his time, listened to Kirk splash around for a minute, singing tuneless as he scrubbed. “Kid,” he hollered finally, “you did write that shit down before you went for the soap, right?”

There was a long, pissed-off pause. “Goddamnit!” Kirk had yelled. “Son-of-a—!”

Leonard shakes his head, fumbles in his pocket for his credit chit as the car levels off, as the door to his parents’ house comes into view.

It’ll be quiet, Leonard’s life, without Kirk. And god knows the family abode is enough of a tomb on a good day. Which this, he thinks, sure as hell is not.

He pulls his chit out of the slot and the car door swings open. He sits there for a moment, one foot on the ground, and wonders if it’s too late to run.

Then there’s someone on the portico, staring, squinting into the sunlight.

Shit, he thinks. Yeah. It is.

“Leonard,” Randa says. “It’s good to see you.”

She says it in the same way she used to say _pass the salt_ or _have you seen my favorite medscanner_ or _Len, why do you insist on sleeping on my side of the bed_. She’s dressed in the whites that civvie docs favor and her face is tight, like she’s doing her damndest not to cry. Leonard saw that look a lot, the last few months they were together.

He looks at her hands folded across her chest and he thinks: you used to touch me. Every day, for years and years. I used to dream about your hands on me, about the drift of your fingers over my chest as we fucked, about the way you dug your nails in the small of my back when you came. You dug valleys in my body with those hands, once.

He doesn’t feel it, what he thought he might, seeing her again: some sort of pull to, towards her. It’s been three years since she burned his life to the ground, almost two since they’ve seen each other. Still, he thought some part of him would try to overlook all the bad and want her again, reach for her in some vain hopes of finding comfort, maybe, or solace.

But then, he thinks, watching her turn, following her into the cool dark of his father’s house, he hadn’t felt either of those things for a long, long time. Even when they were still together.

The door closes and he sets his bag beside it, just in case he needs to make a break, and gets his first good look around. The house hasn’t changed a damn bit; well, the foyer hasn’t, anyway. It’s like stepping into a stasis field, this house, a space trapped in a perpetual loop of an unwelcoming past.

“How’s Dad?” he says.

“He’s alive.”

“How much of him is still him?”

She tugs at her ponytail, perched perilous on her head. A nervous tic. “Oh, he’s still him. Still ornery as all get out.”

“You know what I mean.”

She looks him in the eye, spreads her hands. “He can’t sustain any of his own biofunctions at this point, Len. The Berelllian fever’s too far advanced, I told you. But the computers are handling it fine.”

“Jesus.”

“They’ve been doing it for weeks. He’s fine. He’s alive.”

The words get out before Leonard can stop them. “He’s not fucking _fine_ , Randa! He’s dying. Hell, he’s dead already. Or he should be. Why the hell are you letting them do this to him?”

“I’m his doctor, not his daughter, damn it! This is your family’s call, Leonard. Not mine.”

McCoy wants to punch something: the wall, his mother’s gilded mirror. “Goddamn it, he loves you! He _trusts_ you, blood relation or not, a hell of a lot more than anybody who’s actually kin. This isn’t what he’d want, wasting away like this, unaware of the whole fucking world. You _know_ it’s not.”

“What the hell would you have me do?” she says, righteous fury. “Pull the plug, kill him right there in his bed?”

“You should’ve gotten him to sign an advanced directive when he was first diagnosed.”

“He refused to talk about it! With me or your sister. He said he was afraid.”

“Of death?”

“Of dying.“ She takes a breath and steps away, shields her eyes from him for a minute. “He might have listened to you, when it came down to it,” she says, quieter now. “When he was first diagnosed, he might’ve—”

“Yeah, well,” Leonard says. “You should’ve called me then.”

It’s unfair and he knows it, knows what his father can be like when he’s got his mind set on something. He’s worse than a mule in molasses, that’s what Leonard’s grandmother used to say. His mother’s description had been a lot more profane.

Randa turns her back, but not before he sees the hurt tear over her face, the regret. “He’s in the study,” she says. “He’s awake now, or he was a few minutes ago. You want to see him?”

She moves without waiting for an answer and Leonard trails after her, down the hall and into the dining room, still set up formal to the gills, through the mahogany doors that his father’s grandfather had dragged down from Boston, and into the room that’s been his dad’s sanctuary for as long as Leonard remembers.

He used to hold court in here for his students, when Leonard was a kid, four or five of them clustered on the couch, in the beat-up wingbacks his mother hated. The best and brightest of his residents, the flavors of the year, hanging on his every word, laughing at jokes Leonard never got, passing around the decanter and congratulating themselves on how smart they all were, how clever, how fucking divine. His father had encouraged it, that attitude towards medicine: doctors always knew best, period; patients were an inconvenience to be managed, unruly children who had to be schooled. He can see his father’s face, flushed high with scotch, framed by the bookshelves, saying: “The patient is there to be treated. Not to be argued with or appeased: to be treated. By you. And the sooner you remind them of that fact—the more often, as needed—the more effective a practitioner you’ll be.”

The Bostonian accent was long gone, worn away by the centuries, by distance, but in moments like that, in gestures grandiose and patrician, it snuck up from the shadows and wound its way through his father’s words. Made him seem more alien than not.

Sometimes Leonard wanders if that’s what his mom had seen in him, all those years ago: an outsider, still, somehow, because all of his ancients hadn’t been Georgia born and bred.

Leonard had met Randa at one of his father’s shindigs, in this room, shaking her hand as she rose from his father’s side. “Hi,” she’d said then, blond hair and the damndest green eyes. “I'm Miranda Hu. Nice to meet you, finally.”

“Finally?” he’d said, wishing on all that was holy that he’d put on clean jeans, had looked a little harder for his favorite shirt. “Did I keep you waiting?”

Her smile had shifted and she’d looked at him then, really looked, politeness swept away by something a hell of a lot more interesting. “Why don’t you tell me? You worth waiting for, Leonard McCoy?" 

He’d missed his shuttle back to med school in Richmond that night. The one in the morning, too. They’d made love in her rickety bed until all they could manage was a soft, lazy fuck with no sound, her mouth moving over his cheek, his hands teasing the lush curve of her breasts.

“God, you’re sweet,” she’d whispered as he came, shuddered out all he had left to give. “Anybody ever tell you that, Len?”

And lord help him, he’d believed her.

She was older than he was, and wiser. Or so he’d been sure at the time. Funny as hell, a damn good doctor, and lord, she’d looked pretty in his arms, her eyes closed, whispering his name.

He loved her before he knew it and said so before he should have and they were married too soon, right after her residency ended and she got her stethoscope for good. The first year had been hard—he was still in school and she was working all the damn time—but it made the time they had together sweet, strung through with a passion, an urgency that he took as a feature, not a bug.

Holding her hand on the tram, arguing about the Federation’s latest gambol with the Romulans, making dinner with her pressed against his back, biting his neck and doing dirty shit to his cock under his apron, that’s what those first years had been like.

When things fell apart, it wasn’t for any one reason, except when you got down to it, neither of them had been any good at being married, at doing the everyday things you have to do in order to stay the most important person in somebody else’s life. Hell, Leonard hadn’t known what he was signing up for when he put his name on the contract that first year, the fifth, the seventh. He’d thought he did, though. He’d been sure of it. 

And now, here they are, their marriage long gone and his father dying in front of them, curled into a ball in the biobed, a machine tuned to the bloody business of keeping him alive.

The whole room’s been transformed since he last saw it. Now it's a monument to the ugliness that can come at the end of life: decanters replaced by biocomp wands, the shelves nearest the bed emptied of books and knick-knacks and covered in medscanners instead. The only sign of life is a vase of orchids by to his father’s head.

“Lee was here last night,” Randa says, catching him looking. “She brings them every week.”

She steps to the side of the bed and finds his father’s hand. “David? Leonard’s here.”

His eyes don’t open and he doesn’t move; the only response is on the monitor: a brief jump in his frontal neural activity. At this stage in Berellian, though, it’s as good as it’s gonna get.

“Hey, Dad,” Leonard says. He pats his father’s ankle where it’s bundled under the blanket, lets it sit there. “It’s me.”

His father’s skin is stretched thin and yellow, so sallow it’s almost translucent. His cheeks are sunken and his arms are wasted, his body caught in a classic kameloyd curve. Leonard doesn’t have to look at the screen to know that it’s textbook, his dad’s case, and some part of him thinks that’d make his father damn happy, to know his illness was following the letter of the law.

“I’ll just be outside,” Randa says, to him, to his father, he’s not sure. “Holler if you need me.”

She moves away, closes the big doors behind her.

“So I’m here,” Leonard says after a minute, more to break the silence than anything, the eerie stillness that’s antithetical to everything his father was in life. “I’m in San Francisco now, at Starfleet Academy. Did Randa tell you? I’m not sure how she knew. Probably her lawyer. They’re like bloodhounds, those guys, even if you can’t get blood from a stone.”

The blanket’s synthetic, hospital-brand, and for the first time, Leonard wonders if his father started out there, up in the big white tower he’d spent so much of his life in, or if he didn’t make it that far, to the hospital, had just holed up in his own home to die. Leonard wouldn’t put it past him.

“How’s Lee? She good? She’s still hitched to that Roger guy, right? You remember when him and me got into a fight that Easter, right after they got married? I said something that pissed him off—gods, I don’t even remember what is was—and he started shouting, yeah, and threw that goddamn glass duck at my head during dinner, remember? The one Lee made you in first grade.” The sound of the thing shattering, his own roar of laughter, Roger’s beet-red face, Lee’s mortified smile. “God, what an ass. He still like that, Dad? I bet he is. Time doesn’t change people like that.”

He moves up the bed, finds his father’s hand. It’s caught in a fist, so tight that his knuckles are white, that Leonard can cover the whole thing with his palm.

“I had a message from Mom last week. Just a static; she didn’t catch me live. She’s still out on Europa, you know that? Looking to go further in a few months, she said. I don’t think she’d mind me telling you.” He reaches out, brushes the thin strands of hair off his father’s brow. “I guess you didn’t tell her you’re sick, huh? She’d have liked to know. She hasn’t hated you for a long time. But I bet she hasn’t told you that either, has she?”

It’s so fucking strange, talking to his father like this, because his dad hated to let anyone get a word in edgewise. Leonard doesn’t think he’s ever gotten this many words out in a room that his father was in, not once in 35 years.

“Dad,” he says. “You shouldn’t have done this to Randa, shouldn’t have put her in a position like this. You know that, right? I’m choosin’ to believe that you do. Even if you didn’t trust me, you should have given Lee some direction, helped her decide what was best for you, and not just left all of us to watch you waste away, to watch you—”

His voice stops, he makes it, as soon as he feels the tears come.

                                                                                                               ****

He comes back in the evening, the next morning, and the hours with his father are like that: a long monologue on his part with only the monitor lights as a chorus, cheering him on. The hours bleed together, in his father’s sickroom, with each hour the same as the rest, the end just as inevitable and just as goddamn far away.

He and Randa don’t really speak. They don’t have to. They both know why he’s here: to say goodbye. And yet he can’t get the words out. Not yet.

It’s not until the next afternoon that he realizes, weary and stupid, that he hasn’t commed Kirk yet, not once since he landed, and gods, does he need to hear the kid’s voice, see his stupidly pretty face.

“Oh god,” Kirk says, stricken, the moment the line opens, “Bones! I was worried. Can I say that? Because I was. Are you ok?”

He wants to be smart about it, say something like, _what the fuck do you think?_ , but all that comes out is a shake of the head. “No, I’m not.”

Kirk studies him, tugs at the collar of his t-shirt and stares some more. “You wanna talk about it?”

Leonard laughs, the really ugly one that’s more like a sob. “What's there to say?”

The kid lets that sit, lets the quiet stretch through one breath and the next. It’s weirdly comforting.

“Tell me about your day,” Leonard says, finally. “What happened in Religion and Psychology? Didn’t you have a quiz today?”

Kirk blinks, then it’s like a switch flips: he’s Leonard’s idiot best friend again. “Ugh,” he says, flopping back in his desk chair, dramatic. “More like a comprehensive fucking midterm, Bones. Don’t remind me.”

“How’d you do?”

A quickfire smile. “Oh, I was 98th percentile. Wasn’t worried.”

“You weren’t, huh? Kid, you’ve been sweating that test for two weeks.”

“Yeah,” Kirk says, “exactly. I knew I was ready.”

Leonard’s mouth finds a smile, the first in two days. “You’re a piece of work, Jim, you know that?”

Kirk grins, leans into the lens, his face alight. “Why, Len, I thought you’d never notice.”

At McCoy’s urging, he prattles on for a while about their neighbors in the dorm, an Edosian and a Rigelian who are either fighting or fucking or both, depending on the day of the week. He shows Bones the three PADDs he had to buy for next semester, that he’s gonna read over the break, because of course he is, Mr. Pre-Preparation. He talks about the cute guy he saw on the tram yesterday and didn’t even hit on, that’s how focused on his midterms he is.

“Who are you and what the fuck have you done with Jim Kirk?”

“Ha ha,” Kirk says, his face the color of his uniform. “That’s what I’ve missed about you, Bones: your stone-cold rapier wit.”

Leonard laughs and it hurts his chest, weirdly, makes him feel heavy and sad that Kirk isn’t here, that he can’t reach out and mess up the kid’s hair just to hear him swear, that Jim isn’t here to squeeze his shoulder or filch his coffee or drag him to the cafeteria and make him actually eat.

“Hey,” Kirk says, and there’s a softness in his voice that Leonard cannot fucking bear. “I’m sorry this is happening, Len. But I’m glad you’re there, that you can be there with him right now.”

 _Not everybody gets that_ , he says without saying and McCoy has to turn away, has to swallow around a catch in his throat. “Yeah. Ok.”

“You need me, you call me. Day or night, whatever. Wake me up, I don’t care. I’ll be here." He smiles, a shadow of his regular, inveterate grin. “Stop trying to be nice and lean on me for once, ok? Let me help.”

Leonard nods. “Yeah, Jim. I will.”

When he looks up, there’s something on the tip of Kirk’s tongue, he can see it, but the kid shakes it off, lets it go, says: “You damn well better.”

                                                                                                                ****

He takes a shower and pretends to sleep for a couple of hours, but he keeps hearing the sound of his father breathing, the machines creaking his lungs open for him, the seamless whirrs, heavy click.

Around midnight, he says fuck it and pulls on his jeans, yanks on his coat.

The night nurse lets him in, but Randa’s still there, of course she is, hovering. 

Leonard closes the big doors behind him, firm. “We’re taking him off the machines,” he says.

Randa looks up, the medscanner frozen in her hand. “Excuse me?”

He hadn’t made up his mind until he said it, but now, he can’t see any other way. “We're turning off the computers, Randa.”

“I can’t do that.”

McCoy crosses his arms. “Wait a second. You said that it’s not your call, not a decision that you can make for him.”

She stares at him, her face illuminated by the scanner’s yellow-green light. “Ok. I may have said that." 

“So, I’m making it. Me, as his son, who also happens to be a doctor, much to his never-ending surprise.” There’s a bitterness in the words that tastes bad, but it doesn’t make them less true.

He can see her wavering. “What about Lee?”

“What about her? She’s had months to think about it, to do something, and apparently, this was her best fucking solution.” He throws his hands around, takes in the mechanical sustainers of life, the creature that was once his father, now battered and beleaguered by pain. “And frankly, it’s bullshit. We both know that.”

She sets the scanner on the pillow and takes two steps, moves into his space. Her hand on his face is cool and firm and the look in her eyes has shades there that he remembers, echoes of happier days. She looks, he thinks, like the woman he used to love, nothing at all like the one who tore his life apart. But then, he’d had a hand in that, too. “We don’t have to tell her that he didn’t get there on his own,” Randa says. “She knows the time’s coming.”

He folds his hand around her wrist, gentle. “Let’s do that.”

“Are you sure?” she says. “Leonard. You’ve got to be sure.”

“Would you do it, if you were me?”

She doesn’t hesitate. “I’d have done it weeks ago.”

He squeezes her wrist, lets her go. “You were always his favorite for a reason, Ran.”

They put on some of his father’s favorite music—”Songs from my misspent youth,” he used to say, just to get Leonard’s goat, because his father had never misspent a moment in his life, not fucking ever—and stand on either side of him, Randa holding his hand while Leonard ticks the systems off, one by one.

In the end, he doesn’t say goodbye, not in so many words. But he is there to bear witness to his father’s last breath, to feel the chambers of his heart open and close, open and close, and stop. He’s there to help Randa clean his father’s body, wash his skin and wrap him in a clean blanket, a real one Leonard pulls from his bed upstairs.

There’s no pain anymore, nothing holding his father back from moving on to the great wide beyond, no sound in the house now, in the last minutes before dawn.

By mutual agreement, he leaves before Randa calls Lee, but not before they wrap their arms around each other and hold on. A proper goodbye, this time, one that’s not litigated or negotiated or purely on paper. It feels a hell of a lot more final than the divorce decree ever did.

He kisses the top of her head and she kisses his cheek and he leans his head against the window of the cab, watches the sun struggle up out of the ocean and spread its arms to Savannah.

                                                                                                                   ****

The kid’s waiting for him the spaceport.

“Hi,” Kirk says. “Surprise. I kind of eavesdropped on your comm channel to see when you were coming in. Kinda. Or, I didn’t, personally, but there’s this hot ensign in comm services who owed me a—”

McCoy drops his bag and grabs the kid, squeezes the breath out of him. “Jesus, Jim, am I glad to see you.”

Kirk shuts up and hugs back, his jaw morning rough against McCoy’s own, and they stand there, in the middle of the damn crowd, holding on for what feels like dear life. “Missed you, too,” Jim says, the words warm against Leonard’s ear. “Nobody bitched at me for three days. I almost didn’t know what to do with myself. I swear, my self-esteem went up like ten points, at least.”

McCoy laughs and leans back, doesn’t quite let Kirk go. “Only ten points? You must not have been trying real hard.”

“Right?” Jim says. “I expected more of a rebound.” He shoves half-hearted at McCoy’s shoulder. “Maybe you should have stayed away a little longer.”

Their eyes meet and god, Leonard had forgotten how bright they were, how painfully blue. “No,” he says. “I sure as hell shouldn’t have.” He shakes his head, the awful crush of the last few days catching up to him, brutal, and he feels himself sag, feels his face fall. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m just—I don’t know, not real good company right now. I’m sorry.”

Kirk touches his cheek, easy, then peels out of his arms. “Lemme buy you breakfast,” he says. “And you can tell me about it, if you want. Or you can just eat doughnuts and pour coffee down your throat. I won’t judge.”

Maybe it’s the lack of sleep, or the emotional bullshit he’s just swum through, or the fact that the kid made a point of being here, waiting for him, but suddenly it seems like a great idea to kiss Jim Kirk, to catch his face in one hand and his hip in the other and press their mouths together, simple and sweet.

When he pulls back, Kirk is staring at him, his smile shaky and wet. “Still not judging,” he says. “But I, ah—” He tips up and kisses Leonard again, teases his lips open with a hot little hum.

“Breakfast,” McCoy says, in the little space left between them. “Then we can talk about it, ok? There’s a lot I haven’t told you.”

Kirk rubs his smile against McCoy’s, holds on to him, tight. “Ok,” he says. “I’m all yours.”

**Author's Note:**

> The one note in Star Trek V that's always rung true for me is Leonard deciding to take his father off of life support. I was curious to see AOS McCoy confront a similar choice.


End file.
